Today's entrepreneur: Shawn Ivey

Katie Gatto · January 11, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/15ca

No. 1 mistake: Lack of focus. Always too much to do and too little time...

Entrepreneurs, and those who work at startups, are a special part of the workforce.

They embrace innovation and disruption. They live on the edge, and, at times, chase the latest shiny object. But their willingness to fail and try something new often enable them to make a big difference.

The Vator community is made up of these unique people. To that end, we've changed our user profiles to allow entrepreneurs to express their interests and lessons about entrepreneurship.

These profiles will allow us to highlight an entrepreneur every day.

Today's entrepreneur is Shawn Ivey.

I am: an Entrepreneur

Name companies you've founded or co-founded:

Digital Home Systems, QualXpert Software, Splore

Name companies you've invested in:

All the companies I've started...

Name startups you worked for:

Folio, Open Market, NextPage

If you are an entrepreneur, why?

Fortune cookie told me to...

List your favorite startups:

Evernote, Dropbox, Tumblr, Flipboard

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

Patience (don't have enough!), and the satisfaction of seeing real people benefit from innovation.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneur's make?

Lack of focus. Always too much to do and too little time...

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

It always takes longer and costs more than you thought.
The right partner makes all the difference.
Keep a notepad handy on your night stand...

Katie Gatto

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Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Flipboard

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on October 19, 2010

The world's first social magazine. Flipboard is a fast, beautiful way to flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter.

Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboardʼs mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, browse and share content across their social networks.

http://www.flipboard.com/
http://twitter.com/flipboa rd

Splore

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on December 13, 2010

Splore takes social networking, crowd-sourcing, and knowledge sharing to a whole new level. The web revolution created an explosion of websites. And that information overload led to a greater dependence on search engines, question and answer sites, and discussion forums. Today, the focus is turning to individuals, and empowering each of us to connect with the right people and the right information, at just the right time - leveraging location services where appropriate. Splore helps people pursue the things that are most important in life - their passions, causes, hobbies...by helping to leverage the increasing wealth of data and knowledge available around the world.

After intensive user and market testing with a generic beta product release, we have just recently "pivoted" towards an initial focus on peer to peer healthcare. We are actively developing (but have not yet released) a custom instance of Splore targeting this industry.

Chronic illness affects nearly half the population of the United States. While physicians provide critical diagnosis and treatment options for their patients, these individuals and their loved ones must deal with traumatic lifestyle changes every day, often for the rest of their lives. Not only do these conditions result in 7 out of every 10 deaths in the world, and many billions of dollars in medical costs, but they also leave hundreds of millions of isolated and unhappy people in their wake.

Splore was founded by physicians and technology professionals. Its immediate goal is the development of social/mobile software solutions to empower patients to create meaningful peer-to-peer connections with other patients, healthcare providers, and an entire wellness ecosystem looking to improve the lives of those suffering from chronic disease.